BEN MARCUS WARPS REALITY BY INVERTING EXPERIENCES

KEVIN CANFIELD; Courant Staff WriterTHE HARTFORD COURANT

Ben Marcus is an awful young man -- unsightly and impolite and, at best, marginally talented. Just ask his father.

"If you are in a position to look at this Ben Marcus," Michael Marcus warns readers of his son's second novel, "Notable American Women" (Vintage Contemporaries, $12.50), "it will help to scan smartly away from his form on occasion to the more realistic objects in the landscape -- the trees and houses and people that happen to fill your view, or the bookcases, lamps and flowers -- in order to appreciate just how wrongly Ben's body juts out of nothingness into a space worthy of a more substantial creature or household object."

Still not convinced? Then listen to his mother, Jane Marcus. "Left to his own devices," she explains in the book, "Ben would have no devices."

Marcus' novel tracks the bizarre interactions and wanderings of characters named after the author and his parents, who he insists are nothing like their fictional namesakes. It is a bizarre little book in which a group of women congregate in Ohio for the purpose of achieving complete silence; members of the cultish group swear to a "Promise of Stillness" and practice something called "The Fainting Project." After all, "Fainting is a form of aggressive sleep," and what is more silent than sleep?

The fourth stop on a monthlong promotional tour brings Marcus to Real Art Ways, 56 Arbor St., Hartford, tonight at 8. (Also reading will be Steve Almond, author of the story collection "My Life in Heavy Metal" (Grove Press, $23) and Stewart O'Nan, author of several acclaimed novels.)

Speaking from his home in New York, Marcus talked Thursday about his book, his parents' reaction to having deeply warped characters named for them and his unusual pledge to help readers get the most out of the novel.

Q: I know this stuff is sort of hard to pinpoint sometimes, but I wonder if you could talk about the formulation of a pretty bizarre conceit for a novel.

A: I feel like it came to me in a bunch of different ways. One was that I wanted to make an inverse portrait of my past, or to take things from my past and turn them all inside out, tell the biggest lies I could about them. I grew up in a warm, really kind, emotional family, and everyone talked all the time, and everyone's ideas mattered. So inversions of that tended to create this silent family where emotions were discouraged or forbidden, in a way that was almost a formula I used to keep myself from being sentimental or from believing too much in my story because it had happened to me. I thought that if it had not happened to me at all, I might be able to get at it and make it new for myself.

On a totally different track, I used to read a lot of reference books in the library just to kind of get voices in my head, and the book has a lot of technical hard-core authoritarian voices. I liked them in a perverse way because I feel like they perpetrate truth whether you can verify it or not. It's like a kind of fiction -- the language makes it true whether the topic is true or not.

So I found these original biographies that were actually called "Notable American Women" and they were written in the '50s by men, of course, as a sort of initial attempt to admit women had made intellectual achievements. They were written in this incredibly condescending, cruel tone, saying that, "Well, even though she might have had some important ideas, even her father said she wasn't an original thinker." In retrospect we can look back on old scholarly writing and see all the bias and emotion and personality. So I was kind of into doing that, like taking a voice that wasn't used to accommodating feeling and family and personal stuff and inserting that into it so that it feels surprising and maybe moving.

Q: This has been done before -- an author uses his own name as a fictional stand-in in a book -- [Philip] Roth and many others have done it. Were you fearful of using that tack because it had been done?

A: I just was never comfortable making up a name, and I never have been. The names that I make up just look made up and to me I want it to feel true. But the story line itself is so patently untrue, so many things go on in this book that could never have happened that the names were this odd way for me to ground it in reality just for myself. Like if I had called the main character Keith, I just think I wouldn't have cared, it would have felt remote.

I was aware of this device being used. In my very first book ["The Age of Wire and String"] I wrote a bunch of definitions, and one of them was for my name -- the Ben Marcus; I was trying to essentially take my identity and disfigure it and make stuff up about it. I guess it just interested me, and unfortunately I do sometimes get interested in stuff that other people have already done. It is an idea that's out there and I guess it's one that I like.

Q: Who is your mother in real life, as it were?

A: She is named Jane Marcus, like the character in the book, and that's really where all similarities end. She's a feminist literary critic; she's a professor; she mainly has done a lot of scholarship on Virginia Woolf.

I liked the idea of writing as my mother. It just seemed liberating for me to think about what the worst thing my mother could say about me would be, I don't really know why. It's as though I somehow had this voice of punishment because I would be afraid if she ever were that mad at me, like I could anticipate what she might say. And that might have to do with some hyper-advanced, developed self-critical power that I have, like the ability to think the worst about myself. By assigning it to my mother, though, it seemed even more authoritative.

Q: How did your mother take it, and I guess you dad, too? I guess your father's real name is Michael?

A: I think because there's really nothing of them in any real substantive sense in the book they don't seem at all unhappy about it. I think that they appreciate the attempt to fictionalize family. Although my dad [a mathematician] said a friend of his asked him why he allowed the use of his name. My dad said, "What do you mean allowed. I wasn't consulted." So they haven't acted mad at me. It seems OK so far.

Q: So far?

A: Maybe they'll slowly start freezing me out, or maybe by portraying them as these cruel, cold experimental parents they'll just slowly become that. By dreaming the worst about them I've now guaranteed that they'll become that.

Q: That's all right for you, though. You're probably free of their grip by now.

A: I'm kind of a free agent now that I'm 34.

Q: You promise on Page 50 here, "If you would like to fondle the author, I should take off my clothes for you and sit on a bed to the tune of a funeral march, or a sound track of your choice, or no music at all." Is that something you can deliver on if readers try to take you up on this?

A: I'll give it a shot. That comes out of a sense that the book is never enough, that a book is just a book and a book can be closed. It would be so amazing if we could follow our readers home and give them massages and take care of them, like help them read, like rub the book into their body. It's this sense that the book just can't do what I want, that I have this big desire for somebody and all I can really do is write a book. So yeah, you know. I'll do that if it's the right person. If they ask really nicely. Or really meanly.